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DeWinter's pyramid-topped design for Watermark included 262,000 square feet of leasable office space built on top of a six-story parking ramp.

A riverfront restaurant was planned on the first floor along with a skywalk connecting to the Amway Grand's parking ramp (built almost 20 years later as part of the JW project).

Four floors in Watermark were to be leased as the new home headquarters for Varnum Riddering Schmidt and Howlett, a law firm that wanted a higher profile spot in a brand-new downtown building.

Varnum had outgrown the space it occupied in the mirrored glass Prime Bank Building on the southwestern corner of Pearl and Monroe, now commonly referred to as the National City building.

The Watermark concept advanced to the point where DeWinter said he was within 30 days of construction starting. Amway, which owned the land, had agreed to sell.

According to DeWinter, all the design and engineering work was done. Construction financing was in place. The state employees pension fund was on board as a major investor. Owen-Ames-Kimball was to be the general contractor.

DeWinter was sure shovels were about to hit the dirt.

Then, Varnum pulled out.

After months of back-and-forth negotiations, Bob Grooters won the firm for his Bridgewater Place project on the western bank of the Grand River off Bridge Street.

To this day DeWinter thinks Grooters scored Varnum with a low-ball lease deal just to get his twin-tower concept "on the wrong side of the river" out of the ground.

Grooters doesn't deny it, saying Varnum drove a hard bargain.

"They beat us up so badly that eventually we gave them the deal they wanted," said Grooters, who had already started building the first of the Bridgewater towers by that time.

From what Grooters recalls, the vote in the Varnum board room hinged on one or two votes by younger partners. The lease was announced in The Press on May 11, 1990.

Donald L. Johnson, managing partner at Varnum when the negotiations took place, said the decision was tough. The firm knew it was in the driver's seat with the ability to make or break either project.

"Bob and Marv are both great guys for the city and the community and it was really hard to choose between the two," Johnson said. "It was hard to say no to Marv; and it would have been hard to say no to Bob."

The decision ended up being the correct one, Johnson said. Though some partners were concerned the western bank of the river wasn't close enough to downtown (making a quick trip to places like the Pen Club more difficult), clients found Bridgewater easier to get to than the central part of the city.

"It's been a great decision," he said. "I think all the partners, even those who were negative about it, changed their opinion over a period of time."

DeWinter was stunned, especially since many at Varnum had been keen to remain close to, even attached, to the Amway Grand.

The project didn't die right away. NBD (now owned by Chase), one of the lead banks in providing construction financing, said it would stick with DeWinter under one condition.

"When Varnum decided to go across the river then NBD (the bank now owned by JP Morgan Chase) said they would acknowledge if I could produce a substitute tenant, and I found two substitute tenants," DeWinter said.

DeWinter found those tenants -- sort of.

Teledial, a homegrown long-distance reseller, agreed to lease the top two floors. Amway took another two.

But DeWinter said NBD refused to sign off because Amway, by its own admission, never intended to occupy the space it would lease.

"Amway thought it would be good for downtown and good for the hotel there," DeWinter said.

Somewhere around 1991 DeWinter said he handed the project over to the Canadian construction firm Ellis-Don Limited along with Kalamazoo development firm Plazacorp.

"By then I lost a lot of money," DeWinter said. "We had invested over a million out of pocket. The (Plazacorp/Ellis-Don) group thought they could do something with it. They didn't give me any money for it but they spent a lot of money advertising it. They were going to pay me maybe a half million if it was built.

"I personally had probably three quarters of a million invested," DeWinter said.

A press release announcing plans to build the newly rechristened One Grand Rapids Place was issued on Feb. 18, 1992.

The only substantial modification to DeWinter's original design was shifting the main entrance from Campau to a narrow spot next to the old Israels Designs for Living building on Pearl Street. Another skywalk also was planned over Pearl connecting to the Amway Grand.

The last sentence of the 1992 release proved to be its undoing: "Construction of One Grand Rapids Place is contingent on securing commitments for approximately 50 percent of the building's leasable space."

That goal was never achieved and the project simply withered away. DeWinter's shot at another one of his designs becoming a riverfront icon was lost.

"I would have liked it, but that wasn't to be," said DeWinter, who sold his practice and now works for Grubb & Ellis Paramount Commerce as a commercial real estate agent. "But the Amway Grand, I get a great deal of pleasure every time I walk through there."